Making Mosaic Steps with Railclone

For this project, the client wanted to see different mosaic options, irregular shapes and random colors. Instead of using the traditional photoshop approach, I have decided to test Railclone inside 3D Studio Max and see what type of results I can achieve. The beauty of using Railclone is that once you have made your initial setup it, its pretty easy to extend the mosaic to almost any surface using splines.

It is important to create tiles of same size, for this example, all tiles are 4cm by 4cm, then you can change the design within those parameters. Otherwise, railclone will create gaps between tiles.This is how the Railclone settings look, all 10 designs of tiles are joined together using Randomize. I also used Transform, just in case I need to modify scale of all the tiles later. X spline is the green line in the next image, and the Y spline is the yellow line. Clipping area wasn’t really necessary in this case, nothing was extending beyond too much.So here is the first built, obviously something is missing, the top of the step. In order to create the full step, we have to split the Y spline at 90 degree angle.By copying the X spline we can create multiple steps with just one RC object.Y spline extendedFinished product!Each tile and mosaic had to look slightly different, so for the materials I used Multitexture in the diffuse slot with about 15 different tile images. So each element within the tile received a different texture. I also copied that multitexture material into reflection slot. Nothing fancy, just worked out fine with Corona Renderer!Multitexture with tile images